Google +1 Counts Appearing in Search Results

In what seems to be an attempt to further push its new Google +1 button, Google is beginning to show the number of +1's sites have received in the search results, whether or not you're logged in to a Google account and regardless of which browser you use.

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Roamler – mobile app lets people get paid for small, local tasks

Now in invitation-only beta, Roamler offers iPhone users interested in earning extra cash an easy way to tap into an ongoing stream of small assignments while they go about their daily lives. Examples might include taking a photograph of a potential retail site, for instance, or verifying a product’s placement on the local retail shelves. 

Roamler’s client brands make their requests with the company, and Roamler offers the work to its users based on their location. In exchange, they earn between EUR 2 and EUR 4 for successfully completing each mission. Users also gain points and badges for each assignment they successfully complete; the higher their resulting status, the more challenging assignments they get and the more money they earn. Roamler was launched earlier this month with Heineken and the City of Amsterdam as its first partners. The video below illustrates the company’s premise in more detail.

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Mobile apps are now more widely used than the web

In 2011, for the first time, smartphone and tablet shipments exceed those of desktop and notebook shipments (source: Mary Meeker, KPCB, see slide 7).  This move means a new generation of consumers expects their smartphones and tablets to come with instant broadband connectively so they, too, can connect to the Internet.

In this report, Flurry compares how daily interactive consumption has changed over the last 12 months between the web (both desktop and mobile web) and mobile native apps.  For Internet consumption, we built a model using publicly available data from comScore and Alexa.  For mobile application usage, we used Flurry Analytics data, now exceeding 500 million aggregated, anonymous use sessions per day across more than 85,000 applications.  We estimate this accounts for approximately one third of all mobile application activity, which we scaled-up accordingly for this analysis.

Our analysis shows that, for the first time ever, daily time spent in mobile apps surpasses desktop and mobile web consumption.  This stat is even more remarkable if you consider that it took less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage, driven primarily by the popularity of iOS and Android platforms.

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Nokia announce the N9

With the N9, Nokia has “invented” a new gesture: the swipe. The phone has no home button (although you do get volume switches and the like on the side), so returning to the home screen is done by swiping in from any side of the screen. This could be annoying or awesome, depending on implementation. The N9’s familiar icon-driven interface is divided into three sections. Events shows you the feeds from your friends’ social networks, along with notifications. A multitasking view shows an Exposé-style tiled view of all open apps, and the applications view shows all your apps as icons.

Impressive, but the outside is even better. Gone is the busy, miniature-computer styling of previous Nokia smartphones. This thing is a sleek marriage of a giant 3.9-inch 854 x 480 AMOLED Gorilla Glass screen curving gently out from a polycarbonate unibody body. It’s like a giant iPod Nano, in a very good way.

If Nokia can knock out phones this good with Microsoft’s lovely Windows Phone 7, then things might not be as bleak as they seemed. Available soon, price to be announced.

See more at Wired and the official site

Unofficial Facebook site InsideFacebook announce that Facebook is losing users in mature markets

Facebook is still growing towards 700 million users, having reached 687 million monthly actives by the start of June, according to our Inside Facebook Gold data service.

Most of the new users continue to come from countries that are relatively late in adopting Facebook, as has been the trend for the past year.

But overall growth has been lower than normal for the second month straight, which is unusual.

The company gained 11.8 million more people over May, following 13.9 million over April. In contrast, it grew by at least 20 million new users over the typical month in the past 12; while there have been a few months that have registered lower growth numbers, they have not been back to back.

Why the drop? Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. This is the first time the country has lost users in the past year. Canada also fell significantly, by 1.52 million down to 16.6 million, although it has been fluctuating around that number for the past year. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all posted losses of more than 100,000. If these countries — most of whom had adopted Facebook many years ago — had not lost users, and instead posted even small gains, Facebook would have had a much more typical month.

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Google Introduces Me On the Web

Google introduced a new feature available in your Google Dashboard called Me on the Web. It's officially announced purpose is to "help understand and manage what people see when they search for you on Google.Google suggests this tool will help make it easier to monitor your identity on the Web and consider this a next step in providing options to protect your identity.

Offering assistance for setting up search alerts, managing your online identity and helping you remove unwanted content, this service sounds altruistic enough. With the recommendation Google recently gave suggesting web content authors use rel=author and rel=me attributes, this announcement seems like a natural follow-up idea.  However, the new Dashboard section is merely links to how-to's help articles and different interface to Google Alerts, which are not new.

The second step to managing your identity, according to Google's help topic, is to create a Google profile. In fact, if you don't have a Google profile, you can't use "Me on the Web," because it reports information you entered on your Google profile.

From Facebook-like profiles to their +1 button, it's no secret that Google has ambitions of being more social. Getting a profile is the first step. And Google is trying every reason to get people to sign up for one.

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To Make Search Faster, Google Speeds up the Web

For Google, faster search means a better experience for consumers. But making search faster means speeding up the web as well. Today Google unveiled a host of new enhancements for search, including search by image and new tools to make mobile queries easier. But it also is attempting to make the web itself faster by pre-loading web pages in search results for those using Google's Chrome browser or other browsers with a special plug-in.


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Google Voice Search: You Can Hear Me Now

Google brought mobile innovations to the desktop Tuesday with the rollout of a variety of technologies -- the most innovative: voice search. At an event in San Francisco, Mike Cohen, Google manager for speech technology, said mobile devices have spurred the need for these features, even on the desktop. The search engine processes years of non-stop speech daily. 


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Google Voice Search & Search By Image Comes To Desktops

Mobile innovation is fueling Google’s search offerings for the desktop, as the company today announced two new search interfaces — Voice and Image — inspired by mobile Voice Search and Google Goggles, respectively.

With Voice Search for the desktop, which is a feature of the Chrome browser, users click a microphone icon in the search box, and then speak into their computer’s microphone.

Google Search by Image for the desktop, part of Google Image Search, builds upon the image-recognition technology the company previously rolled out for mobile in Google Goggles. As in Goggles, users input an image, and Google returns results it believes are related to that image, along with similar images. Users select an image by dragging and dropping, uploading, or inputting an image URL. Installing a Chrome or Firefox extension enables searching by image by right clicking on the image on the Web.


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Survey: Print Yellow Pages More Trusted Than Search Engine & Social Networks

Who still uses yellow pages? San Francisco has even banned delivery without permission, assuming no one wants them. But a yellow pages industry group is pushing back in part with a new survey saying yellow pages are more trusted, more widely used and perceived by consumers to be more accurate when it comes to local information than search engines and social networks. 


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Does Re-targeting Show a Lack of Respect for Our Customers?

An Opinion... Stalking Them on the Web May Not Be Good for Your Brand 


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Have you seen Qwiki?

Qwiki's goal is to forever improve the way people experience information. Whether you’re planning a vacation on the web, evaluating restaurants on your phone, or helping with homework in front of the family Google TV, Qwiki is working to deliver information in a format that's quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search.


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A survey says over half of smartphone owners say their phone is their life

As mobile technology continues to evolve, a majority of smartphone users are fully integrating their devices into every aspect of their daily lives. According to a recent smartphone survey conducted by Prosper Mobile Insights™ among smartphone users on their devices, 52.9% say they utilize all of the functions of their smartphones—it’s their life. 30.4% say they use the basic functions of their smartphones plus some applications and 16.7% only use their smartphones for calling, texting and emailing.

With all the unique features of smartphones, texting (21.6%), Internet (16.7%) and email (15.7%) are the top functions smartphone users say they cannot live without. Calling features (7.8%), GPS (6.9%) and Facebook (5.9%) are also necessities to some.

With new technology, however, comes new concerns, and the top privacy issue among smartphone users is location tracking, followed closely by unauthorized access to personal information

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Nokia is bringing the e-wallet to India

Handset maker Nokia is looking for a pan India coverage for its Nokia Money, the mobile payment services enabling consumers to pay directly from their Nokia mobile phones in India, a top official said.

"We are now planning for a pan India coverage for our Nokia Money this year," Nokia Mobile Financial Services Director, Gerhard Romen told media.

The e-wallet services of the firm is currently available in Mumbai, Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), Nasik, Pune, Chennai and Chandigarh and the company will soon commence its operations in Surat, Baroda, Rajkot, Lucknow, Kanpur, Kochi and Kozhikode, he said.

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Apple’s new Cloud and operating system

Apple® today introduced iCloud®, a breakthrough set of free new cloud services that work seamlessly with applications on your iPhone®, iPad®, iPod touch®, Mac® or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and automatically and wirelessly push it to all your devices. When anything changes on one of your devices, all of your devices are wirelessly updated almost instantly.

“Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it—it all just works.”

The free iCloud services include:

The former MobileMe® services—Contacts, Calendar and Mail—all completely re-architected and rewritten to work seamlessly with iCloud. Users can share calendars with friends and family, and the ad-free push Mail account is hosted at me.com. Your inbox and mailboxes are kept up-to-date across all your iOS devices and computers.

The App Store™ and iBookstore℠ now download purchased iOS apps and books to all your devices, not just the device they were purchased on. In addition, the App Store and iBookstore now let you see your purchase history, and simply tapping the iCloud icon will download any apps and books to any iOS device (up to 10 devices) at no additional cost.

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Introducing: The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors

Search engine optimization is one of the most important marketing activities available to companies and publishers, but it’s too often considered some murky “dark art” or a sinful practice that should be avoided. It’s not. To help clear away some of the mystery and fear for those new to SEO, and provide a “reset” for those who are experienced, we’ve created “The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors

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Google Buys PostRank to Boost Social Analytics

Last week, Google bought PostRank, a social analytics service that tracks and measures social posts. With this acquisition, Google has gained a resource to better understand the social web, and that resource can be applied to great impact in several of Google's key social arenas. 


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New Sitelinks Format

With the new embedded format of Ad Sitelinks, there are no additional lines appended to your text ad. Instead, text in your ad that exactly matches one or more of the sitelinks in your campaign will automatically be linked to that sitelink’s destination URL. 

Example of text ad with embedded sitelinks

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Google Web Search Results May Add More Pictures

Google announced when your search has the intent of wanting to see pictures, Google will make sure to show more pictures on the web results. If you add images, pictures, photos and so on to your search query, Google will likely display a wider array of images directly on the search results page. 


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Twitter and Google launch alternatives to the ‘Like’ button

Twitter announced its 'follow' button last night with 50 sites already plugged in, including Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. The follow button sits next to a named Twitter user, and lets the reader start following that account on Twitter with one click. The Twitter account name and number of followers appear next to the button. Third-party sites add the button by adding a short piece of code.

Twitter's new follow button on the CNET site

Google's unveiling of its new +1 button had to be moved forward after a partner company accidentally leaked the news. +1 first launched in late March next to search results for just 2% of English-language results in the US. This next phase of +1 will put it in much more direct competition with Facebook's like, inviting third-party publishers to add the button to their sites.

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Google, Yahoo, And Bing Collaborate On Structured Data To Make Search Listings Richer

A la 2006, today, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo collectively announced that they will be partnering to create schema.org, a resource for site owners and developers to learn about structured data and gain insight into how to improve their sites’ search results. The site adds more than 100 new forms of website markup for content ranging from movies to places in an effort to standardize, and thus improve, how websites are crawled and presented in search results. “The site aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages”, Google’s announcement reads.


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Why Invest in Brand Keywords?

An issue in SEM that has been raised by many of our clients is whether or not advertisers should be bidding against branded keywords. The first impression is that these keywords may appear against pages in which the advertiser’s site is already organically ranking against. A recent article in Search Engine Land suggests key reasons why advertisers should be investing in brand keywords.

Brand Protection & Trust
Advertisers who don’t cover their own branded keyword phrases become more vulnerable to competitors who may be seizing the opportunity. Also, having both the organic and paid positions results in a higher level of trust for the brand. 


Dynamic Messaging

The fluid nature of paid search allows advertisers to update and optimise ad messaging in real time, which can ensure that the right message is delivered at the right time. This ensures that advertising is relevant, as well as allowing for testing of different messages.

Value Ads Within CPC
New engine features including sitelinks, location extensions, product extensions,

PLAs and Rich ads in Search typically only display on highly relevant keywords

with high quality scores, aka your brand keywords. Without them, these

opportunities become harder to seize and benefit from.

Shrinking Efficiencies
Brand terms often can form the basis of testing, optimisation and expansion plans of SEM accounts by allowing the less efficient components of the campaign to be floated. Removing brand terms can result in shrinking efficiencies in terms of the reported return. These keywords are likely to have higher quality scores benefiting the entirety of the campaign.  

Increased Real Estate

By bidding on brand keywords, advertisers can take up greater coverage of individual search engine results pages. A single advertiser can and should appear in multiple instances on the same page.

These are all valid propositions for why brand keywords should form part of a SEM campaign, but we always keep in mind to assess the individuals client’ needs and situation to provide a recommendation. Factors such as budget, targeting, level of competitor activity are all need to be taken into consideration.   

See the original article here, and another here

It’s Here: Google +1 Buttons For Websites

As expected, Google is now offering +1 buttons that can be placed on any web page via a short code snippet. The code/button is supported in 44 languages, but +1 activity continues to show only on English-language search results on Google.com. (Google says it’s working to expand +1 worldwide.) 


Webmasters can use Google’s self-serve code generator to customize the size and language of the button, along with a few other advanced options. 

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Google Testing URL Above Search Results Snippet

Google is testing a new layout for the organic and paid search results. In this test, Google is placing the destination or display URL above the search snippet or description and below the title of the search result. Typically the URL is placed under the snippet or description, not above it. Example from Search Engine Land as below:

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Google To Begin Charging For Directions Location Extensions

Google announced they will begin charging for searchers clicking on the directions of the location extensions found on some AdWords ads. Location extensions add an address and phone number to your Google AdWords ads. 


In the past, clicking on a phone number via your mobile phone to call the advertiser or clicking on an address to bring up directions to the advertiser cost that advertiser nothing. Yes, clicking on the phone number was one thing Google eventually started charging for but not for driving directions. That is changing. 


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